A District Level Exhibition and Project Competition under INSPIRE Awards - MANAK (Million Minds Augmenting National Aspirations and Knowledge) was inaugurated at DIET Kulgam, today, where the students from various schools exhibited more than 300 models prepared by them.
The Deputy Commissioner (DC) Kulgam, Dr. Bilal-Mohi-Ud-Din Bhat inaugurated the exhibition and also took overview of these projects besides interacting with the students. ADDC Kulgam Showkat Ahmad Rather, CEO, Principal DIET and other officers also attended the programme.
The students explained their innovations and communicated their inherent merit to all visitors and jury members. The innovations reflected a realization of national priorities like technologies for making digital India, for cleanliness and sanitation as well as local and day to day necessities like picking fruits and road safety innovations to avoid accidents, minimizing pollution etc.
About 321 models/Projects were displayed by the students and evaluated by a panel of experts including experts from National Innovative Foundation of India. Out of the 283 models displayed by District Kulgam, 29 best models were selected for UT Level and 38 models displayed by District Shopian, 04 models were selected for UT Level exhibition.
It was informed by DNO Arshad Hussain that Innovation in science pursuit for inspired research (INSPIRE) scheme is one of the flagship programmes of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) Government of India.
The inspire awards-MANAK being executed by DST with National Innovation foundation-India (NIF) an autonomous body of DST aims to motivate students in the age group of 10-15 years and studying in classes 6th to 10th.
The objective of the scheme is to target one million original ideas/innovations rooted in science and society applications to foster a culture of creativity and innovative thinking among school children.
The scheme also supports disbursement of inspire awards of 10,000 rupees into the bank accounts of short listed students through direct-benefit transfer scheme. Authorities from DIET also informed that DIET Kulgam has 100% achievement in this regard for the year 2020-21, probably the only district in the country with flying colour results.
They added that all the institutions of the district including MS, HS and HSS prepared 2878 innovative models and as per norms 10% of the models got selected/ shortlisted which amounts to 283 models. The total projects selected for the whole UT were only 1276 and District Kulgam has 22.17% share out of it.